My Story, Part IV: My Bee Venom Journey in a Nutshell
For the sick and suffering considering bee venom therapy as their first-line treatment for Lyme disease—as I did—or those who have tried everything from antibiotics to herbs to rife machine and are now pinning their last hopes on BVT, this is probably the entry you’ll want to read from me. First things first: BVT really does work for Lyme, either acute or chronic. But like all things health-related, treatment—and its outcome—is heavily dependent on the individual and their circumstances. Still, I can say that having anecdotally observed dozens of Lyme cases over the past six years or so, the only people I’ve seen get truly well—cured, as you might put it—are those who did BVT.
In this post, I’ll go over the basic outline of 3 years, 3 months of treating with BVT, which I did from early 2019 to early 2022. While my case is only one of many, I think it’s probably fairly representative of a more or less straightforward case of Lyme being healed with bee venom—though it certainly wasn’t without its ups and downs.
As I wrote in my last post, I decided to start BVT at the end of 2019, when, after a full year of unexplained, severe illness during which I was repeatedly gaslit by various medical professionals—an extremely short period of time when it comes to getting a Lyme diagnosis, I’d like to note here, with many sufferers of the chronic form searching for an answer to their diffuse symptoms for years or even decades—I started to investigate chronic Lyme and received a positive diagnosis when I tested using the company IGeneX. Since I had already been researching Lyme for a few months at that point, I knew that treatments such as antibiotics and herbs seemed to provide temporary relief at best, and decided to go straight to BVT based on the many stories of complete healing that I had read.
At the time, I had been corresponding on Instagram with Brooke Geahan, a former Lyme sufferer who healed completely on the bees. In late 2018/early 2019, Geahan was sharing a lot of information about her Lyme healing journey on her Instagram page; this was before she founded something called The Heal Hive, later in 2019, if I’m not mistaken, which today charges Lyme sufferers huge amounts of money and makes them jump through absolutely unbelievable hoops in order to sign up for their guided online BVT course. But that’s a story for another day, isn’t it?
In December of 2018, Geahan organized an informational BVT event in downtown Manhattan, and somehow, I found it within me to make it there. At this stage of my illness, I was very, very sick, almost completely homebound and quite frequently bedridden. What do I mean by this? Because my stores of energy were so incredibly low and any kind of activity could put me out for hours or even days, I basically lived between my bed and my couch, taking advantage of the smaller bursts of energy I was occasionally blessed with to get into the kitchen and create healthy meals, mostly in my Instant Pot, which definitely streamlined the cooking process. Once that had been accomplished, I’d eat the same dish for several days in a row, until it was all gone, and I’d find the reserves to make another batch meal.
But as Geahan advertised the event, she promised that anyone toting along their positive Lyme test and an EpiPen—an auto-injector of epinephrine that is kept on hand when stinging just in case an allergic reaction develops—could receive their test sting, or the micro-sting from a live bee that ensures one is not anaphylactic-allergic to bees. This is, obviously, one of the most important first steps when beginning BVT, and it seemed like a good idea to get a test sting from a seasoned BVT veteran, so I used all my energy to pull on a heavy winter coat, plod slowly to the subway station, and take the train a few stops to the yoga studio where the event was to be held.
At the BVT event, a small group of young women in yoga pants formed a semicircle around Geahan, who sat cradling a small wooden box of softly buzzing honeybees. (Anecdotally, I’ve observed that Lyme primarily affects women, who may be more at risk for chronic illnesses in general due to the fluctuations in hormones that affect our immune systems every month). Some of the women, like myself, had been accompanied by their mothers, who were interested to learn more about this strange bee treatment their daughters were considering.
From the center of the circle, Geahan held forth on the Lyme-busting mechanisms of BVT, and how she’d used it to conquer her debilitating tick-borne infections. Afterwards, we women shared story after story of our own health challenges, and the talk ran long; we hurried down the hall to reception as the evening yoga class began in the studio. As everyone besides me pulled on coats and scarves—I was the only one who had decided to spring for a test sting—I located my EpiPen and asked Geahan to anoint me. Using a pair of specially designed, reverse-locking tweezers, she grabbed a honeybee from her box and, pulling up the bottom of my shirt, allowed the insect to sting my lower spine. My mother pulled up 911 on her phone just in case, but after about 15 seconds, the verdict was in: I was not allergic to bees. The bee’s venom sac pulsed and twirled inside my back—the first of more than 4,500 stings I would go on to receive over the course of my three-year treatment.
As anyone familiar with BVT for Lyme will know, the goal for treatment is to work your way up to 10 spinal stings in a session, with three sessions per week and time taken off in between to rest and detox. Although this sounds simple in theory, those dealing with a high load of Borrelia bacteria—not to mention those from other co-infections such as babesia and bartonella—will have strong reactions to the venom, at least initially.
In the Lyme world, when a treatment that’s effective provokes a strong physical response—an intense migraine, say, or a daylong bout of fatigue—it’s called Herxheimer reaction, shortened to “herx” among Lymies. The phenomenon is thought to be a response to bacteria being killed off within the body and thus releasing toxins and other debris that need to be cleared out, and is named after the German dermatologist Karl Herxheimer, who in the early 1900s observed that the syphilis patients he treated with antibiotics would temporarily experience a worsening of their painful skin lesions—before they got much better. Borrelia bacteria, like syphilis bacteria, are known as spirochetes due to their spiral form, and so the phenomenon is noted in Lyme treatment, as well.
In the early weeks of of my BVT journey, following the advice typically espoused by online groups such as Healing Lyme with Bee Venom, I remember trying to up my stings per session by about one a week, ie, doing just one sting per session the first week, two per session the second week, three per session the third, and so on. Although I noted early positive changes in my symptoms such as more awake time in the day, an increased ability to concentrate (I had almost lost my ability to read because many words had stopped making sense to me), and less body pain, I quickly lost all those gains as the herx effects snowballed and I was overcome with crushing joint pain and unending fatigue. This was incredibly scary and disheartening, but caused me to change course. I slowed way down on my “ramping-up,” eventually taking a full 10 months to work up to the “full dose” of 10 stings per session, and was able to even out and improve slightly.
By six months of BVT, I reported in the Facebook group that symptoms such as brain fog, a highly irregular menstrual cycle, and the “internal vibrations” that felt like a buzzing cell phone was going off inside my body had totally resolved, and that symptoms such as extreme fatigue and moderate hair loss were lessening. “I strongly believe in BVT as my best option for making a full recovery and am committed to stinging for the full 3 years if necessary,” I wrote on March 29, 2019. “I also have grown very fond of the bees and read about bees and beekeeping daily.” By this time, I had also started tentatively returning to the world of freelance journalism after being completely without work for nearly a year, publishing articles on Lyme and BVT in outlets such as VICE and Medium.
Healing isn’t linear.
I’d love to say that the rest of BVT was a breeze, with my symptoms only improving and never sliding backwards, but that simply wasn’t the case. There’s a commonly shared graphic in the world of chronic illness that depicts the healing journey not as a linear one, but rather as one with all kinds of messiness and losses in addition to the gains. This was absolutely my experience on BVT, and, I’d like to note, the experience of most if not all of the stingers I’ve spoken with who went on to heal completely, like I eventually did.
Paging through my history of posts in the BVT Facebook group, I see triumphant updates sharing how I was able to travel on a plane for the first time in years (written in September 2019), as well as fear-filled entries in which I ask for reassurance from the group. At 2 years and 4 months of stinging, in April 2021, I wrote, “A lot of my symptoms are coming back. I have a lot of fatigue, pain throughout my body and a headache almost every day. I’ve even had brief windows of depersonalization, a symptom BVT took care of for me in the first 1-2 months of treatment.”
For anyone reading this who’s currently stinging, thinking about BVT, or even using a different Lyme treatment, I want to note here that this two-steps-forward, one-step-back manner of healing chronic illness is the norm. When so many systems of the body get completely broken down—and when you mix in the trauma and nervous system dysregulation that comes along with chronic illness—it’s actually a bit naive to expect a straightforward recovery. In the end, after many frightening episodes in which I stopped believing that the bees were working and that I was backsliding, I did leave chronic Lyme disease behind for good. And along the way, I continued to write articles about BVT, filmed a short on the therapy for VICE News, and even hosted a successful BVT meetup event in New York City, which gathered about a dozen stingers and would-be stingers together for an afternoon of healthy snacks and test stings.
I stopped stinging in March of 2022, at 3 years and 3 months of BVT. I was not fully healed at this point; I would estimate that though I was about 80% well and had returned to a life in which I could generally be active, maintain relationships, and work a steady (remote) job, I would still be visited by occasional “flares” of intense fatigue and/or body pain. At this point, I didn’t feel that BVT was going to do anything else for me, and when I stopped stinging, I turned my attention to other things that could help get me to the finish line.
In my case, these ended up being quite a few sessions of kambo (a strong and broad-spectrum venom “milked” from the skin of an Amazonian frog); identifying a severe Vitamin B12 deficiency that I now treat with weekly injections; and several safe and well-accompanied psychedelic medicine ceremonies, specifically ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms, to help identify and address the lingering traumas caused by being so sick for so long.
To that last point, I don’t think the importance of addressing deep-seated mental and emotional trauma and getting it “unstuck” from the system can be overstated in the case of chronic illness. It’s absolutely as essential as treating anything physical, and is something that every Lyme patient needs to address, whether via psychedelics or talk therapy or hypnosis or EMDR or any of the dozens of modalities designed to facilitate this process.
Today, I am wholly and vibrantly well, an experience, in this body, that I will never again take for granted. Every single day, I practice gratitude for my healing process, one which was in doubt for several years—and I undoubtedly owe the bulk of my recovery to BVT.
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